Retroid Pocket 2 review | PCMag

Emulation is a great way to play your old favorite games with certain restrictions. It remains a legal gray area at best, and simply downloading ROMs from the internet is out of the question, whether or not to say so with a wink and a nod. But if you can back up your own classic game collection in ROM and ISO form, you can have it all stored on a single, easy-to-use device. We saw this with the Polymega retro game console, a simple recommendation for disc-based games up to the fifth generation of game consoles.

The handheld emulator market is a different story and is full of Chinese-made gaming devices that use Linux or Android to emulate systems. The Retroid Pocket 2 is the first of its kind we’ve officially looked at: an Android handheld with physical game controls and a design reminiscent of the Game Boy Advance. It can emulate games for systems up to Sega Dreamcast and PlayStation Portable and is available for a very affordable $ 84.99. It looks good, feels good and mostly plays very well, but not for the technically faint of heart.

First class design

The Retroid Pocket 2 looks better than most Chinese gaming handhelds. It’s available in a variety of retro-inspired color schemes, including Game Boy Advance Indigo; gray with various SNES, Super Famicom, PlayStation and even Game Boy colored buttons; black with black, red, or PlayStation-colored buttons; Yellow; Blue; and pink. The color schemes are just right and with their palettes are reminiscent of various classic play systems.

The system also feels absolutely solid and is reminiscent of Nintendo handhelds of the past with its excellent build quality. The chassis is very strong and the various controls are springy and balanced. There are no wobbly buttons or loose sticks and no flex in the system itself. It just feels good to hold.

The control layout is very similar to the Nintendo Switch in portable mode with Joy-Cons connected. The 3.5-inch IPS LCD is flanked on the left by an analog stick and a directional pad and on the right by four buttons with a shorter, flatter analog pad. The height of the left analog stick makes it a little harder to pocket than if both controls were flat 3DS analog pads, but both feel smooth and responsive. The Home, Start, and Select buttons are located under the lower left corner of the screen. On the upper edge of the Retroid Pocket 2 there are two pairs of triggers, which surround a micro-HDMI connection for video output, a USB-C connection, a volume rocker, a power switch and a power LED. At the bottom of the system is a 3.5mm headphone jack and a rubber door that covers a microSD card slot.

Hardware and software

The Retroid Pocket 2 contains a 1.5 GHz Cortex-A7 quad-core CPU, a 500 MHz ARM Mali400 MP2 GPU and 1 GB LPDDR3 RAM. It’s not a flagship in terms of specs, but it’s a $ 85 device too. The handheld also has 8 GB of onboard memory, of which 5 GB is available. For connectivity, the device has 802.11b / g / n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, and the USB-C port provides both power and data.

The Retroid Pocket 2 has enough power to emulate NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, Sony PlayStation, PlayStation Portable and Sega Dreamcast. Emulators for all of these systems are pre-installed on the system, including two versions of RetroArch with the appropriate hardware cores.

The Retroid Pocket 2 runs Android 6.0, with an update to Android 8.2 scheduled for this month. You shouldn’t expect it to get the latest version of Android, nor should it; This is a retro gaming handheld and shouldn’t be treated like your average Android device. Android functions are awkward to use even without a touchscreen, but the directional pad is quite easy to adjust to various icons and menu options, and you can control a mouse pointer with the left analog stick by holding down the home button for a few seconds. All you have to do is browse menus, make changes, and open apps.

Front end options

The basic Android shell allows you to open individual emulators and play games on the Retroid Pocket 2. However, this is not the ideal user interface for the device. The storage surface is clunky and awkward. Fortunately, there are several ways to load the handheld with other, more game control-friendly front ends. Unfortunately, it can get complicated.

At the beginning, the Retroid Pocket 2 comes with a separate partition that contains RetroidOS, an interface developed by Retroid that arranges all games in a clear list and automatically loads them into the appropriate emulator. In addition, more than 2,000 games are loaded onto the system via a dubious loophole that could allow Chinese handhelds to be shipped with game ROMs that would otherwise be illegally distributed (since there is no upload or download and they cannot be accessed at boot). Also, most of the games included are in Chinese.

Fortunately, RetroidOS and all of its oddities can be ignored and only accessible if you manually install it from the partition. Outside of RetroidOS, you can insert any game ROMs into the Retroid Pocket 2. Of course, you are responsible for legally obtaining these yourself (we don’t ask questions or give you ideas; for legal reasons, PCMag doesn’t condone piracy in any form, you probably know the exercise). The emulators are still installed on the system without RetroidOS and are accessible via the standard Android interface.

You can also load front ends that perform similar functions to RetroidOS, but without the thousands of dodgy Chinese ROMs. The Dig front end is pre-installed on the Retroid Pocket 2 and can bring all of your games and emulators together into a single menu system to make it easy to browse Android icons. Dig is also slow and closed source. Its development has also been abandoned, remember that.

I have had great success with Pegasus on the Retroid Pocket 2. Pegasus is another front end that is similar to Dig but is open source and is actively developing. It is also very tedious to set up, especially if you want to use scraping to add additional media such as screenshots and box art to your games list. I followed this very helpful guide on how to configure Pegasus on a Retroid Pocket 2 and even then it took two days for the UI to work the way I want it to. Now that I have it, each game system and game has its own little icon and blurb screenshot for each game in an attractive Nintendo Switch-inspired menu system. I highly recommend Pegasus for the Retroid Pocket 2, but you will have to do some legwork to get it where you want it.

Emulationsleistung

Regardless of how you set up the front end of the system, the Retroid Pocket 2 will use the same emulators to run games (unless you dive deeper and switch emulators, which is not recommended). With 8- and 16-bit systems like NES, Game Boy and Super NES, the games run smoothly and react without problems. The Nintendo 64 and PlayStation run just as well on the system as the Game Boy Advance games. With all of these systems, you can count on a generally consistent experience.

The Retroid Pocket 2 only stutters with PlayStation Portable and Sega Dreamcast games, especially with PSP games with complex 3D graphics. For the Dreamcast, I found Crazy Taxi played very well, but Sonic Adventure was riddled with rendering glitches and felt sluggish. On the PSP, Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles and Lumines 2 played smoothly, but God of War: Chains of Olympus flickered and ran at half speed at best. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories also ran very slowly, with a choppy, uncomfortable sound. Typically, the handheld is great for sprite-based games. However, 3D games can be a hit-or-miss problem, especially when you leave the N64 and PlayStation generations behind. The emulation can be very processor intensive and only costs as much power as $ 85.

The Retroid Pocket 2’s battery life isn’t particularly impressive. Depending on the type of games you are running, you can expect between three and five hours of juice between charges.

Fun, with an effort

The Retroid Pocket 2 is a retro handheld that rewards you for putting the work into it. By default, it offers either a clunky Android interface or a very questionable front end with even more questionable games. It is worth going to some effort to get Dig or Pegasus up and running while you load the system with games, as the system feels like a proper gaming system rather than a thrown-together Android device being wrestled into a game role . I’m really excited to keep my retro game collection in the system, especially after taking the extra steps to give it a nice Pegasus front end.

This, of course, is all it takes to find games legitimate (backing up games you own with a CD drive or Retro Freak for cartridges). Otherwise we won’t tell you how to get games on the Retroid Pocket 2. However, for the simple joy of playing many classic games on one system, this is a winner. It really makes you work for it.

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